In the ruins of the office of the regional governor in Mykolaiv which was destroyed in a huge Russian missile strike in March, Maj Gen Dymytro Marchenko called what was happening in the flat farmland of Kherson Oblast the battle of the villages - tactical fights on a local scale. "We're trying to take positions that we need for the counteroffensive. We are not standing still. Every day we recapture a village," he said.
